Bitcoin topics

Thursday, February 1, 2018

Top 5 Bitcoin Wallets

Much like in the real world, the next step would be to determine which wallet brand better suits you. Here is a short list of our favorites to help you choose:

Coinbase

A truly exceptional Bitcoin wallet and exchange mechanism, servicing 2.8 million customers in 32 countries with a total Bitcoin turnover of $2.5 billion in exchanges. This wallet connects directly to your brick and mortar bank account to exchange Bitcoin into and out of your local currency. It has mobile apps for Android and iPhone apart from the web browser platform. They have insurance on the Bitcoin held within their servers, and offer a secure multi signature vault to store your coins. The vast majority of the Bitcoin held by Coinbase is stored cold.

Cubits

Founded in 2014, it offers a whole platform to buy and sell Bitcoin. They support Bitcoin exchange using 17 different currencies, and they work with Onlinebanktransfer.com, Sofort, OK pay, SEPA and Swift, offering their customers

a wide variety of vehicles to receive or send money after they purchase or sell Bitcoin. The most important feature in their platform is 100% multi signature cold storage. Cubits uses their own Bitcoins in hot wallets for transactions guaranteeing the security of your own Bitcoins within offline wallets. Moreover, the cold storage is encrypted, effectively deploying an additional security ring around your coins.

Circle

An exciting option in the Bitcoin wallet industry. Circle has a hybrid system, which means that it translates transfers of fiat currency like USD into Bitcoins once a transfer is made to your account, without forcing the sender to buy Bitcoins at all. This makes its platform a de facto payment platform as well as a wallet. To mitigate volatility while transactions are being made, Circle absorbs the risk by freezing the rates the second the transaction is initiated and until it is completed. In terms of security, Circle has all of its customer’s funds insured.

Xapo

A simple, easy to use wallet that allows you access to a storage vault for your Bitcoins. Based out of Hong Kong, the company offers cold storage of your funds through encrypted servers that are locked behind concrete walls, steel blast doors and radio wave blocking cages. Additionally, Xapo offers their own debit card.

Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions. This ledger of past transactions is called the block chain as it is a chain of blocks. The block chain serves to confirm transactions to the rest of the network as having taken place. Bitcoin nodes use the block chain to distinguish legitimate Bitcoin transactions from attempts to re-spend coins that have already been spent elsewhere. Mining is intentionally designed to be resource-intensive and difficult so that the number of blocks found each day by miners remains steady. Individual blocks must contain a proof of work to be considered valid. This proof of work is verified by other Bitcoin nodes each time they receive a block. Bitcoin uses the hashcash proof-of-work function. The primary purpose of mining is to allow Bitcoin nodes to reach a secure, tamper-resistant consensus. Mining is also the mechanism used to introduce Bitcoins into the system: Miners are paid any transaction fees as well as a "subsidy" of newly created coins. This both serves the purpose of disseminating new coins in a decentralized manner as well as motivating people to provide security for the system.

Bitcoin faucets are a reward system, in the form of a website or app, that dispenses rewards in the form of a satoshi, which is a hundredth of a millionth BTC, for visitors to claim in exchange for completing a captcha or task as described by the website. There are also faucets that dispense alternative cryptocurrencies. Rewards are dispensed at various predetermined intervals of time. Faucets usually give fractions of a bitcoin, but the amount will typically fluctuate according to the value of bitcoin. Faucets are a great way to help introduce new people to bitcoin, or to your favourite altcoin. Many faucets provide information to newbies as well as offering them some free coins so that they can ‘try before they buy’, experimenting with a test transaction or two before putting real money on the line. Since this whole area is so new and a bit scary to some people, who perhaps don’t quite trust it with their hard earned cash yet, this is a great way to promote digital currency and bring in new users

Bitcoin Wallets

Bitcoin is a digital currency in which transactions can be performed without the need for a central bank. Bitcoins are created as a reward for payment processing work in which users offer their computing power to verify and record payments into the public ledger. Called mining, individuals or companies engage in this activity in exchange for transaction fees and newly created bitcoins. Besides mining, bitcoins can be obtained in exchange for money, products, and services. Users can send and receive bitcoins electronically for an optional transaction fee using wallet software on a personal computer, mobile device, or a web application. With Bitcoin, you can send money to anyone in the world without worrying about charges or fees. This makes bitcoin great for freelancers, people who work on the internet, or just about anybody! Bitcoin is getting more widely adopted, with more and more companies accepting it, such as Microsoft, which allows you to use Bitcoin to add money to your Microsoft account.For more information about bitcoin, please watch the video below. If you want to get started